It’s stylishly unassuming, or unassumingly stylish
One of the Nomad’s greatest strengths is its simple mid-century design. It enables the couch to fit in — or at least not clash — with almost any room’s decor. Being able to choose between a quintet of colors, a sextet of leg styles (three wood, three metal), a trio of armrest styles and a pair of back cushion designs makes fine-tuning one for your particular situation easy. (Also, fiddling around with the different options on Burrow’s website feels like the sofa equivalent of the Porsche car configurator: surprisingly addictive.)
It’s not a sleeper sofa, but you can sleep on it (for a little more cash)
If you lack a spare bedroom, being able to turn the sofa into a bed can be a game-changer — whether it’s for visiting relatives, drunken friends or significant others with snoring issues. While the Nomad may not be a sleeper sofa of the traditional fold-out variety, it does offer a way to transform into a bed: Burrow’s Sleep Kit. Check the box when ordering your sofa, and you’ll score a keg-sized bundle that includes a fitted sheet, a top sheet, a blanket, a pillow and pillowcase, an eye mask and — most crucially — a supportive memory foam topper.
Admittedly, the $295 price is a little steep, considering you likely have at least some of those ingredients already at home; you could probably hack together something similar for less. But the Burrow kit is made for the sofa, and fits the design nicely; you could practically leave it in bed mode indefinitely and not think twice about it. With the topper on, the sofa provides a firm yet comfortable sleeping platform — one long enough even for people over six feet tall to sleep comfortably.
What’s Not Ideal About the Burrow Nomad Sofa
It’s more thinly padded than some may like
As previously mentioned, the Nomad is certainly comfy — but anyone who’s looking for an overstuffed plush beast of a couch is liable to be disappointed. You very much sit on the Nomad, rather than sink into it. Plan on plopping some throw pillows down (which you were probably gonna do anyway) if you want to have something plush to lean into when you lounge.
Requires two people and a bit of brute strength to assemble
Due to a combination of (over)confidence, a Y chromosome and an elementary school grasp of basic assembly, I generally tend to be one of those folks who ignores unboxing or assembly instructions that claim two people are required to move or put together a product. Most of the time, it’s worked out okay.
With the Nomad, though, “two-person assembly” really means “two-person assembly.” It took both me and my partner working together to squeeze and finesse the pieces together during the assembly process; one person to push the chunks of couch together (and I mean push, hard), the other to snap shut the latches that serve as the anchors for the sofa. Snapping those latches alone took serious grip strength, too. Putting together the Nomad is simple, sure, but it also takes some elbow grease.
Burrow
